(I have been toying with Exhibit showcase hacks there, gathering up my Exhibit hacks and mashups as I write them.)
On the minus side, you can presently only drop files in a single directory level, files are typically not served at greased-weasel speed and latency and you have to use either a Firefox or Internet Explorer browser to post them, and using an ajaxy form at that -- no sftp, ftp, webdav or HTTP PUT access in sight. (I also believe I've read about a top number of files per site in the 500 range.)
Anyway, I tried to craft my first shaky ruby hack last week, to get a command line client which would let me upload files in batch. I unfortunately failed to navigate the Google login forms rather miserably (should someone want to point out what I do wrong, or rather how I ought to do instead, the broken code is here; a good-for-nothing dozen-liner of WWW:Mechanize).
So I resorted to the classic semi-automated way: logging in by browser, stealing my own cookies and doing the rest of the work with curl. It works, and is less painful than tossing up fifty-something files by mayhem-clicking an ajax form upload, however comparatively nice they made it with a web default style form. This recipe requires a working knowledge of your shell, an installed curl, and being logged in to Google Pages and having chosen the appropriate site.
Then invoke the cookie stealer bookmarklet and copy the value to your clipboard. I suggest you head over to your shell right away, type
export googlecookie='' and paste your cookie between the single quotes.Head back to your browser window, to invoke the auth token post url stealer bookmarklet, which picks up the form target url. Copy it to your clipboard, head back to the shell and type
export googletarget='' (again pasting the value between the single quotes). Now you're set.To upload a file now, all you need to do is run
curl -F file=@$filename --cookie $googlecookie $googletarget and it gets dropped off as it should. And zooming up a whole junkyard of files is no more painful:zsh> for i in *.png; curl -F file=@$i --cookie $googlecookie $googletargetIt's not pretty, but it is some pain relief, if you're hellbent on playing with free services rather than getting dedicated hosting. It's also a "because it's possible" solution -- and those are fun to craft, once in a while. I'd love to find out what I didn't figure out about taming the Google login form via Ruby, or vice versa. Your competent input most welcome.
